[R] Unsigned Posts; Was Setting graphical parameters

[stephen's mailinglist account]

On 4 March 2010 23:47, Jim Lemon <jim at bitwrit.com.au> wrote:
> On 03/05/2010 04:11 AM, Bert Gunter wrote:
>>
>> Folks:
>>
>> Rolf's (appropriate, in my view) response below seems symptomatic of an
>> increasing tendency of posters to hide their identities with pseudonyms
>> and
>> fake headers. While some of this may be due to identity paranoia (which I
>> think is overblown for this list), I suspect that a good chunk of it is
>> lazy
>> students trying to beat the system by having us do their homework. The
>> etiquette of this list has traditionally been, like the software, open: we
>> sign our names. I would urge helpeRs to adhere to this etiquette and
>> ignore
>> unsigned posts.
>>

> I had a working hypothesis about this, but decided to check the data before
> replying. Looking at the ten most recent obvious pseudonyms, all were from
> free email accounts like gmail or yahoo. A few of these included all or part
> of the name of the user anyway. As such accounts tend to be used for lots of
> things, the users may well be concerned about identification, even if
> everyone on the R help list is of the highest moral standing.
>
> Jim
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

Personally I am just paranoid.  I used my normal email address for the
Debian mailing lists a few years ago, then found myself deluged with
spam, and bounced emails where my email had been inserted into the
from field (these generally originated from Russian or Brazilian
domains - if you checked the full headers). Maybe the debian lists
weren't the source and it was harvested by other means, but my full
email address was viewable on some of the news list archives.

I have also suffered some credit card fraud which was fortunately
swiftly curtailed, but it means I am inclined to keep aspects of my
life out of the online domain, and use this completely separate email
address for mailing lists.  It also means I can dip in and out of the
lists, and not clog up a work or personal email account.

R is a tool that I use for part of my job - albeit an excellent tool.
I am particularly happy with the graphics that I have managed to
produce.



-- 
Stephen